Just forked out for a new rig with a fast processor on board? Then Nvidia has some very bad news for you. Your PC is "obscenely" imbalanced thanks to an overpriced, underperforming CPU - probably courtesy of Intel.

It's just the latest salvo in the burgeoning war of words between Nvidia and Intel this year. But what exactly is Nvidia getting at? Talking to TechRadar earlier this week, Nvidia's VP of Content Relations Roy Taylor outlined a developing strategy for leveraging Nvidia graphics technology to accelerate a wide range of PC applications. Very soon, the world will discover just how pathetic conventional CPUs really are.

If Taylor is correct, the initiative will deliver a massive, unprecedented boost in PC performance. We're not talking the 2x or 3x boosts in performance that the PC industry delivers on a regular basis. It could promise as much as 20x or even 100x the performance of todays multi-core CPUs. Yikes.

CUDA cometh

The basic premise is the use of Nvidia's CUDA programming platform (itself closely related to the C programming language) to unlock the increasingly programmable architecture of the latest graphics chips.

On paper, it's extremely plausible. In terms of raw parallel compute power, 3D chips put CPUs to shame. A good recent example is the new room-sized, high density computing cluster installed by Reading University.

Designed to tackle the impossibly complex task of climate modelling, it weighs in at no less than 20 TeraFlops. That sounds impressive until you realise that just a single example of Nvidia's next big GPU, due this summer, could deliver as much 1TFlop. So, a few four-way Nvidia GPU nodes will soon offer the same raw compute power as a supercomputer built using scores of CPU-based racks.

General purpose GPU

A little bit closer to home, one of the early applications Nvidia is promoting as a demonstration of the general purpose prowess of its GPUs is a video encoding application known as Elemental HD.

Downsizing a typical HD movie for an iPod using a conventional PC processor can take up to eight hours or more, even with a decent dual-core Intel chip. Nvidia says the same job can be done in just over 20 minutes on an 8800 series Nvidia graphics board.